November has come and gone, and I have a(nother) confession to make. I did not “win” NaNoWriMo this year. I knew going into National Novel Writing Month this November that it would be a challenge to carve out writing time and actually meet that 50,000-word goal. I wanted it to happen, I really did. But I only accomplished about ten percent of my goal. And I’m okay with that.
In the past, I probably would have viewed this unmet goal as a failure and been disappointed in myself. But a change in perspective has made a tremendous difference in how I handle “falling short.” This year, I preemptively gave myself permission to not only not finish, but to not even start if life necessitated that.
The longer I write and the stronger my relationships in my writing community become, the better I feel about the writing life in general. My friendships with fellow writers have taught me that we all struggle, and we all have unexpected interruptions to our plans that impact our writing journey. We struggle with busyness, stifled creativity, illness, loss, frustration, and more. But the best we can do is stay connected and just keep writing when and where we can, even when it doesn’t look like what we hoped.
Despite only getting about 22 pages written for NaNo, I am counting several other successes from the month of November:
- I have a strong start to a story I’m excited about.
- I thought a lot about this story and its characters so I am better prepared for the time I do spend writing my first draft.
- I took more time to read books by the same publisher who I ultimately hope to submit this manuscript to once it’s completed, edited, and polished. It was good to get a sense of what they’re really looking for before I get the whole draft written.
- I now have more time to flesh out some of the planning I had hoped to complete before starting NaNo.
- I enjoyed a relaxing trip home and additional time visiting friends and family without an obligation or deadline looming over my head.
- I wrote and edited another short, short story that I submitted to a magazine. (Hopefully, I’ll have more to share on that in the future…)
How do you handle unmet goals? What’s something you’ve learned in the past from setting and not meeting a goal? What kind of things do you do to better prepare yourself for the next attempt?